Category Archives: Chef

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2 simple, delicious salads

2 simple, delicious salads
Many recipes are merely starting points, the foundations for a skyscraper's worth of variations, alternatives and tweaks. For me, a recipe shouldn't be seen as gospel; it's there to give you ideas and inspiration rather than represent the only way. As Nikki Segnit explains at length, in Lateral Cooking, a recipe is merely one expression…
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Roast pumpkin, leek, Parmesan & sage tart

Roast pumpkin, leek, Parmesan & sage tart
Pumpkin, sage and nutmeg are a match made in heaven; add some softened leeks and Parmesan, a rich set custard and some pastry and you’ve got a tart to die for! Making tarts can be quite time consuming, especially if you’re making your own pastry. It’s also, in the case of vegetables, often necessary to…
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Beetroot, wholegrain rice, goat’s cheese & dill bake

Beetroot, wholegrain rice, goat’s cheese & dill bake
This super easy recipe was inspired by a couple of sources; The first was a wild rice casserole that I cooked not so long ago from Heidi Swanson’s book Super Natural Every Day; the second is a recipe I learnt at a course at Cookery at the Grange in Somerset over 20 years ago that…
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Fennel, olive tapenade & goat’s cheese tart

Fennel, olive tapenade & goat’s cheese tart
I love fennel both raw and cooked; finely shaved and covered with a delicious orange and sherry vinegar dressing, it’s delicious.  Equally, roasted, or pan fried it’s hard to go wrong.  Here, I’ve chosen to gently cook the fennel in butter until soft and sweet and then bake it with salty olive tapenade and creamy…
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Salads, a great vehicle for flavour balancing

Salads, a great vehicle for flavour balancing
I'm often asked about the process I go through to create a recipe and have been giving this some thought over the past couple of weeks.  And I've realised it's quite hard to articulate! However, things started to become clearer last week after attending a mobile phone photography workshop run by Matt Inwood . Matt took…
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Pan-fried salmon with blood oranges and watercress.

Pan-fried salmon with blood oranges and watercress.
This delightfully light salmon recipe makes use of wonderful blood oranges that are available right now from good greengrocers.  Blood oranges not only have a beautiful colour but they’re also extremely sweet, having an almost berry like quality to their flavour. Here, the juice is used in a dressing to envelop peppery watercress leaves whilst…
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Cheese and quince scones; a little off-piste

Cheese and quince scones; a little off-piste
It might seem an obvious thing to say, but the food I love to create, is the food I want to eat. I'm often plagued with troublesome voices trying to convince me that my food isn't cerebral enough, that it needs to be more refined and plated up as if it's on the culinary catwalk.…
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